Great Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell Page B

her arms.
    He had thought, in the past, that should he ever come upon another mortal in that spot it would be forever spoiled for him, and he would not come again. But he felt no outrage now at this charming vision, and he saw that the girl, too, thought she was entirely alone and unobserved. She bent as he often bent, to lift silver water in her hands, and she drank of it and then threw the rest over her face, and she laughed and shook her head and her long and heavy hair flew like a lifted mantle in the brightening air. She began to sing as she waded slowly and her voice was no more intrusive than a bird’s call, and was all as musical.
    Then she returned to the edge of the pond and dropped her garment and she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared, vanishing behind the trees. Saul then became aware that he had been holding his breath and that his heart’s sound was louder than the song of the cataract and that his face and breast were as hot as if the sun had struck them. He was conscious of a fine trembling through his body, and he wet his lips. Now the scene seemed to him to be less beautiful for the absence of the girl, and lonely.
    He was not a child. He would be fifteen years old before the deepest snows appeared on the Tarsus mountains. He was no innocent, no babe, no ignorant lad. He knew that the girl had set him afire, and he knew what he felt was the first lust he had ever known, as well as a strange tenderness never experienced before, and a mysterious urgency. He desired above all things to touch that slave girl, or that peasant’s daughter, to smooth her blowing hair into quiet with his loving hands, to kiss those red lips and that pale throat, to hold those little hands in his. He wanted to hear her heart beat against his and to feel her arm about his neck, and her breath against his cheek. His loins throbbed, and sweat ran from his brow. He had seen pretty girls before on the streets of Tarsus and working in the fields and even in his father’s garden, but he had looked upon them with indifference. In some astonishing way this girl was different from all others and he believed that she belonged to him as the rock and the cataract and the pond belonged to him, and no one else would ever know her but himself.
    He did not think of the “strange woman” of whom Reb Isaac had told him, whose mouth was the gate to hell and all abomination. The lust he felt and the passionate tenderness, seemed to him as natural and as good and as wholesome as the morning, and not to be despised or rejected. Now he was alive as he had never been alive before, as tumultuous as a young Adam who had caught his first glimpse of his Eve, and as wild with joy. And his desire was no more evil than the desire of Adam for his newly created wife, and was as innocent.
    “Of what are you dreaming, Saul ben Hillel?” asked Reb Isaac that morning. “You are absent and your eyes are far away.”
    Morning after morning Saul arrived silently at the rock and the cataract and the pond, but he did not see the girl again for nearly a month, and she was there when he arrived, singing childishly to herself as she waded in the water and dashed it over her face and rubbed it on her arms. He had told himself that he had dreamt her appearance or that when he encountered her again her countenance would seem less lovely and that the vision would be vanished. But, as he watched her from behind a sheltering tree trunk, she was more beautiful than ever, more desirable, and the urgency was on him more savage than before to hold her against him and taste of those poppy lips. Some water had splashed on the bosom of her chiton and the cloth clung to her young breasts and he saw the swelling outline of them and the virgin nipples. He watched her, entranced, hardly breathing, and then she stepped from the water and was gone, as she had gone that first morning, and he heard no sound of her going.
    He saw her all through the summer, in the early light, and as